Photo Courtesy - Getty Images(JACKSON, Miss.) -- Civil rights advocates and family are cheering the suspension of life sentences for Gladys and Jamie Scott in a deal signed Thursday that includes one woman donating a kidney to keep her sister alive.

Backers have long claimed that the women, who are African-American, were innocent and their life prison sentences for an armed robbery -- reportedly for $11 -- were tinged with racism.

The case had drawn the attention of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour who twice appealed to the Mississippi Parole Board because Jamie Scott, now 38, suffers from kidney disease and requires daily dialysis.

Barbour said their release was contingent on Gladys Scott, now 36, donating a kidney to her sister. Gladys Scott has agreed to the procedure to help her ailing sister.

The 1994 Mississippi case stirred memories of an older, racist South, as the two young women -- then 19 and 21 -- were accused of masterminding the robbery of two men on a roadside in Forest, Miss.

Claiming their innocence all along, the sisters said their car had broken down and three male acquaintances who had given them a ride, had actually committed the crime at gunpoint.

The Scott sisters, who had no prior records, later claimed that the African-American boys -- two brothers and a cousin -- were coerced into testifying against them.

The sisters, who had exhausted all their appeals, would have been eligible for parole in 2014.

Last week nearly 200 people rallied, asking the governor to release the sisters. They have been backed for more than a decade by advocacy groups like the Innocence Project, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP.

"We think they will be released in a week or two," said the sisters' lawyer.